Aginst th' Law

AGINST TH’ LAW

I was rather surprised years later to hear my home town come again as I played one of the songs on the two excellent Mermaid Avenue CD’s, consisting of a set of performances of the lyrics to several of literally hundreds of unrecorded songs by Woody Guthrie that were set to music by the American rock band Wilco and the English singer-songwriter Billy Bragg. One of the songs, “Aginst th’ Law” goes on and on about all of these illegalities – “It’s against the law to talk, and it’s against the law to walk”, etc. – and later in the song, there is the lyric about my hometown: “Everything in Winston-Salem is against the law!”

(March 2013)